This book is not only a major twentieth-century contribution to Dostoevsky’s studies, but also one of the most important theories of the novel produced in our century. As a modern reinterpretation of poetics, it bears comparison with Aristotle.“Bakhtin’s statement on the dialogical nature of artistic creation, and his differentiation of this from a history of monological commentary, is profoundly original and illuminating. This is a classic work on Dostoevsky and a statement of importance to critical theory.” Edward Wasiolek“Concentrating on the (...) particular features of ‘Dostoevskian discourse,’ how Dostoevsky structures a hero and a plot, and what it means to write dialogically, Bakhtin concludes with a major theoretical statement on dialogue as a category of language. One of the most important theories of the novel in this century.” The Bloomsbury Review. (shrink)

The essays assembled here are all very early and differ in a number of ways from Bakhtin's previously published work.

Is the science of moral cognition usefully modelled on aspects of Universal Grammar? Are human beings born with an innate 'moral grammar' that causes them to analyse human action in terms of its moral structure, with just as little awareness as they analyse human speech in terms of its grammatical structure? Questions like these have been at the forefront of moral psychology ever since John Mikhail revived them in his influential work on the linguistic analogy and its implications for (...) jurisprudence and moral theory. In this seminal book, Mikhail offers a careful and sustained analysis of the moral grammar hypothesis, showing how some of John Rawls' original ideas about the linguistic analogy, together with famous thought experiments like the trolley problem, can be used to improve our understanding of moral and legal judgement. (shrink)

Scientists from various disciplines have begun to focus attention on the psychology and biology of human morality. One research program that has recently gained attention is universal moral grammar (UMG). UMG seeks to describe the nature and origin of moral knowledge by using concepts and models similar to those used in Chomsky's program in linguistics. This approach is thought to provide a fruitful perspective from which to investigate moral competence from computational, ontogenetic, behavioral, physiological and phylogenetic perspectives. In this article, (...) I outline a framework for UMG and describe some of the evidence that supports it. I also propose a novel computational analysis of moral intuitions and argue that future research on this topic should draw more directly on legal theory. (shrink)

When is it immoral to take advantage of another person for one's own benefit? For some, such as Ruth Sample, John Roemer, and Will Kymlicka, the answer at least partly depends on whether what one takes advantage of is the fact that this person is, or has been, the victim of injustice. I argue, however, that whether person A wrongly exploits person B is wholly unrelated to whether A takes advantage of the fact that B is, or was, the victim (...) of injustice. I also develop a positive account regarding which personal attributes one should not exploit for personal gain. (shrink)

It was recently shown that the Madelung equations, that is, a hydrodynamic form of the Schrödinger equation, can be derived from a canonical ensemble of neural networks where the quantum phase was identified with the free energy of hidden variables. We consider instead a grand canonical ensemble of neural networks, by allowing an exchange of neurons with an auxiliary subsystem, to show that the free energy must also be multivalued. By imposing the multivaluedness condition on the free energy we derive (...) the Schrödinger equation with “Planck’s constant” determined by the chemical potential of hidden variables. This shows that quantum mechanics provides a correct statistical description of the dynamics of the grand canonical ensemble of neural networks at the learning equilibrium. We also discuss implications of the results for machine learning, fundamental physics and, in a more speculative way, evolutionary biology. (shrink)

Voluntaristic theories of political obligation claim that a citizen's moral obligation to obey his state's laws is grounded in his voluntary undertakings or agreements. Two of this view's more popular varieties are consent theories and reciprocation theories, the former grounding a citizen's political obligation in a promise and the latter grounding it in the acceptance or the receipt of the benefits of social cooperation. A common objection to these theories is that they cannot justify political obligation because the actual relationship (...) between citizens and their state is insufficiently voluntary. (shrink)

Rescued in 1972 from a storeroom in which rats and seeping water had severely damaged the fifty-year-old manuscript, this text is the earliest major work (1919-1921) of the great Russian philosopher M. M. Bakhtin. Toward a Philosophy of the Act contains the first occurrences of themes that occupied Bakhtin throughout his long career. The topics of authoring, responsibility, self and other, the moral significance of "outsideness," participatory thinking, the implications for the individual subject of having "no-alibi in existence," the difference (...) between the world as experienced in actions and the world as represented in discourse--all are broached here in the heat of discovery. This is the "heart of the heart" of Bakhtin, the center of the dialogue between being and language, the world and mind, "the given" and "the created" that forms the core of Bakhtin's distinctive dialogism. A special feature of this work is Bakhtin's struggle with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. Put very simply, this text is an attempt to go beyond Kant's formulation of the ethical imperative. Toward a Philosophy of the Act will be important for scholars across the humanities as they grapple with the increasingly vexed relationship between aesthetics and ethics. (shrink)

This groundbreaking work by one of the world's foremost theoreticians of Russian literature, culture, and thought gives for the first time an extensive and detailed examination of the development of Russian thought during the late Soviet period. Countering the traditional view of an intellectual wilderness under the Soviet regime, Mikhail Epstein offers a systematic account of Russian thought in the second half of the 20th century. In doing so, he provides new insights into previously ignored areas such as Russian (...) liberalism, personalism, structuralism, neo-rationalism, and culturology. Epstein shows how Russian philosophy and culture has long been trapped in an intellectual prison of its own making as it sought to create its own utopia. However, he demonstrates that it is time to reappraise Russian philosophical thought and cultural theory, now freed from the bonds of totalitarianism. We are left with not only a new and exciting interpretation of Russian thought, but also an opportunity to rethink our own intellectual heritage. (shrink)

My primary aims in this paper are to explain what exploitation is, when it’s wrong, and what makes it wrong. I argue that exploitation is not always wrong, but that it can be, and that its wrongness cannot be fully explained with familiar moral constraints such as those against harming people, coercing them, or using them as a means, or with familiar moral obligations such as an obligation to rescue those in distress or not to take advantage of people’s vulnerabilities. (...) Its deepest wrongness, I argue, lies in our moral obligation not to extract excessive benefits from people who cannot, or cannot reasonably, refuse our offers. (shrink)

In this book, Mikhail Epstein offers a systematic theory of modalities and their impact on the philosophy and culture of modernity and postmodernity, focusing on the creative potentials of possibilistic thinking for the humanities.

Mikhail L. Gasparov. Intertextual analysis today. The paper provides a discussion about recent results and perspectives of intertextual analysis — the method that has been a contemporary with Tartu-Moscow school. The connections between the classical philological methods and intertextual analysis are described, together with specifying the concept of intertext and emphasizing the need for the correctness of a researcher, because such an analysis always carries a danger of overinterpretation. Several examples are used to illustrate how the imagination of a (...) researcher can create arbitrary allusions that are not based on the original text and are usually misleading. As a result, the text under study will not become more clear, vice versa, it turns to be less understandable. (shrink)

Members of the family of the Green Fluorescent Protein (GFP) are the only known type of natural pigments that are essentially encoded by a single gene, since both the substrate for pigment biosynthesis and the necessary catalytic moieties are provided within a single polypeptide chain. In sharp contrast to the state of knowledge just three years ago when GFP was the only known protein of its kind, a whole family of related proteins, exhibiting striking diversity of features have now been (...) identified. This provides new possibilities for a variety of studies ranging from applied biotechnology to evolutionary ecology. BioEssays 24:953–959, 2002. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. (shrink)

We prove that the positive fragment of first-order intuitionistic logic in the language with two individual variables and a single monadic predicate letter, without functional symbols, constants, and equality, is undecidable. This holds true regardless of whether we consider semantics with expanding or constant domains. We then generalise this result to intervals \ and \, where QKC is the logic of the weak law of the excluded middle and QBL and QFL are first-order counterparts of Visser’s basic and formal logics, (...) respectively. We also show that, for most “natural” first-order modal logics, the two-variable fragment with a single monadic predicate letter, without functional symbols, constants, and equality, is undecidable, regardless of whether we consider semantics with expanding or constant domains. These include all sublogics of QKTB, QGL, and QGrz—among them, QK, QT, QKB, QD, QK4, and QS4. (shrink)

The contributors to this anthology represent Russian-speaking communities from eight countries of the world, located on three continents: The United States, Germany, Italy, Sweden, Switzerland, Ukraine, China and Israel. Most of the authors also represent different waves of Russian emigration that took place in the last quarter of the 20th century. The book opens with an interview with one of the legendary figures of the Russian diaspora, Russian-American historian Alexander Yanov, and is followed by articles from such prominent thinkers as (...) Igor Smirnov, Anatoly Akhutin and Fr. Vladimir Zelinsky, Boris Groys and Karen Swassjan, Mikhail Epstein and Alexander Genis. Issues raised in these essays cover the whole range of modern philosophical discourse-from epistemology, ontology and philosophical anthropology, to the philosophy of culture, religion, and social and political philosophy. (shrink)

Most of the time our utterances are automatically interpreted as speech acts: as assertions, conjectures and testimonies; as orders, requests and pleas; as threats, offers and promises. Surprisingly, the cognitive correlates of this essential component of human communication have received little attention. This book fills the gap by providing a model of the psychological processes involved in interpreting and understanding speech acts. The theory is framed in naturalistic terms and is supported by data on language development and on autism spectrum (...) disorders. Mikhail Kissine does not presuppose any specific background and addresses a crucial pragmatic phenomenon from an interdisciplinary perspective. This is a valuable resource for academic researchers and graduate and undergraduate students in pragmatics, semantics, cognitive linguistics, psycholinguistics and philosophy of language. (shrink)

This volume examines the elements of formalism and decisionism in Russian legal thinking and, also, the impact of conservatism on the interplay of these elements. This combination leads to internal contradictions in theorizing about law and rights in Russian legal culture.

The challenge of updating the existing curriculum to meet the requirements of blended, interactive and gamified approaches is complex. This article presents the design and results of the application of a gamified activity that was used to enrich a blended Philosophy course taught for two years and taken by more than 450 sophomore students in a large public university in Russia. The combination of social search with multilingual communication became an important educational experience for the participating students.

We investigated the perception of developmental changes in timing patterns that happen in the course of second language (L2) acquisition, provided that the native and the target languages of the learner are rhythmically similar (German and English). It was found that speech rhythm in L2 English produced by German learners becomes increasingly stress-timed as acquisition progresses. This development is captured by the tempo-normalized rhythm measures of durational variability. Advanced learners also deliver speech at a faster rate. However, when native speakers (...) have to classify the timing patterns characteristic of L2 English of German learners at different proficiency levels, they attend to speech rate cues and ignore the differences in speech rhythm. (shrink)

The absence of a clear influence of the responses modified by new connections created by LTP on the development of these connections casts doubt on an essential role of LTP in learning and memory formation without any association with reinforcement. The evidence for the involvement of the monoaminergic systems in synaptic potentiation in the cerebral cortex during learning is adduced, and their role in reinforcement system function is discussed.

Adequality, or παρισóτης (parisotēs) in the original Greek of Diophantus 1 , is a crucial step in Fermat’s method of finding maxima, minima, tangents, and solving other problems that a modern mathematician would solve using infinitesimal calculus. The method is presented in a series of short articles in Fermat’s collected works (1891, pp. 133–172). The first article, Methodus ad Disquirendam Maximam et Minimam 2 , opens with a summary of an algorithm for finding the maximum or minimum value of an (...) algebraic expression in a variable A. For convenience, we will write such an expression in modern functional notation as f (a). 3 The algorithm can be broken up into six steps in the following way:Introduce an auxiliary .. (shrink)

Could a computer be programmed to make moral judgments about cases of intentional harm and unreasonable risk that match those judgments people already make intuitively? If the human moral sense is an unconscious computational mechanism of some sort, as many cognitive scientists have suggested, then the answer should be yes. So too if the search for reflective equilibrium is a sound enterprise, since achieving this state of affairs requires demarcating a set of considered judgments, stating them as explanandum sentences, and (...) formulating a set of algorithms from which they can be derived. The same is true for theories that emphasize the role of emotions or heuristics in moral cognition, since they ultimately depend on intuitive appraisals of the stimulus that accomplish essentially the same tasks. Drawing on deontic logic, action theory, moral philosophy, and the common law of tort, particularly Terry's five-variable calculus of risk, I outline a formal model of moral grammar and intuitive jurisprudence along the foregoing lines, which defines the abstract properties of the relevant mapping and demonstrates their descriptive adequacy with respect to a range of common moral intuitions, which experimental studies have suggested may be universal or nearly so. Framing effects, protected values, and implications for the neuroscience of moral intuition are also discussed. (shrink)

One of the most influential arguments in contemporary philosophy and cognitive science is Chomsky's argument from the poverty of the stimulus. In this response to an essay by Chandra Sripada, I defend an analogous argument from the poverty of the moral stimulus. I argue that Sripada's criticism of moral nativism appears to rest on the mistaken assumption that the learning target in moral cognition consists of a series of simple imperatives, such as "share your toys" or "don't hit other children." (...) In fact, the available evidence suggests that the moral competence of adults and even young children is considerably more complex and exhibits many characteristics of a well-developed legal code, including abstract theories of crime, tort, contract, and agency. Since the emergence of this knowledge cannot be explained by appeals to explicit instruction, or to any known processes of imitation, internalization, socialization and the like, there are grounds for concluding it may be innate. Simply put, to explain the development of intuitive jurisprudence in each individual, we must attribute unconscious knowledge and complex mental operations to her that go well beyond anything she has been taught. (shrink)

In this paper, the predicate counterparts, defined both axiomatically and semantically by means of Kripke frames, of the modal propositional logics $\textbf {GL}$, $\textbf {Grz}$, $\textbf {wGrz}$ and their extensions are considered. It is proved that the set of semantical consequences on Kripke frames of every logic between $\textbf {QwGrz}$ and $\textbf {QGL.3}$ or between $\textbf {QwGrz}$ and $\textbf {QGrz.3}$ is $\Pi ^1_1$-hard even in languages with three (sometimes, two) individual variables, two (sometimes, one) unary predicate letters, and a single (...) proposition letter. As a corollary, it is proved that infinite families of modal predicate axiomatic systems, based on the classical first-order logic and the modal propositional logics $\textbf {GL}$, $\textbf {Grz}$, $\textbf {wGrz}$ are not Kripke complete. Both $\Pi ^1_1$-hardness and Kripke incompleteness results of the paper do not depend on whether the logics contain the Barcan formula. (shrink)

In the paper we consider complexity of intuitionistic propositional logic and its natural fragments such as implicative fragment, finite-variable fragments, and some others. Most facts we mention here are known and obtained by logicians from different countries and in different time since 1920s; we present these results together to see the whole picture.

ABSTRACT This article provides new information about Ayn Rand’s residences in Saint Petersburg (Petrograd/Leningrad). The authors, who based the article on hitherto unknown archival documents, discovered new information regarding the exact location of the apartments where the Rosenbaums lived in the city from 1904 through the 1930s. Furthermore, the article provides information about where Rand’s grandparents, Berko (Boris) Kaplan and his wife Sarah, had been living. Additionally, it offers English translations and Russian originals of archival documents related to the aforementioned (...) locations. (shrink)

This book provides brief expositions of the central concepts in the field of Global Studies. Former President of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev says, “The book is intelligent, rich in content and, I believe, necessary in our complex, turbulent, and fragile world.” 300 authors from 50 countries contributed 450 entries. The contributors include scholars, researchers, and professionals in social, natural, and technological sciences. They cover globalization problems within ecology, business, economics, politics, culture, and law. This interdisciplinary collection provides a (...) basis for understanding the concepts and methods within global studies and for accessing lengthier and more technical research in the field. The articles treat such important topics as the biosphere, ozone depletion, land resources and pollution, world health challenges, education, global modeling, sustainable development, war, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism. The book also promotes academic cooperation, political dialogue, and mutual understanding across diverse traditions and national identities that are needed to engage successfully the many daunting challenges of globalization. (shrink)

I argue against the view that there is intrinsic value in making one's own decisions about the direction and shape of one's life.

Darwin’s (1871/1981) observation that evolution has produced in us certain emotions responding to right and wrong conduct that lack any obvious basis in individual utility is a useful springboard from which to clarify the role of emotion in moral judgment. The problem is whether a certain class of moral judgment is “constituted” or “driven by” emotion (Greene, 2008, p. 108) or merely correlated with emotion while being generated by unconscious computations (e.g., Huebner, Dwyer, & Hauser, 2008). With one exception, all (...) of the “personal” vignettes devised by Greene and colleagues (2001, 2004) and subsequently used by other researchers (e.g., Koenigs et al., 2007), in their fMRI and behavioral studies of emotional engagement in moral judgment, involve violent crimes or torts. These studies thus do much more than highlight the role of emotion in moral judgment; they also support the classical rationalist thesis that moral rules are engraved in the mind. (shrink)

In this comment on Joshua Greene's essay, The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul, I argue that a notable weakness of Greene's approach to moral psychology is its neglect of computational theory. A central problem moral cognition must solve is to recognize (i.e., compute representations of) the deontic status of human acts and omissions. How do people actually do this? What is the theory which explains their practice?

Both context relativists and circumstance-of-evaluation relativists agree that the traditional semantic interpretation of some sentence-types fails to deliver the adequate truth-conditions for the corresponding tokens. But while the context relativists argue that the truth-conditions of each token depend on its context of utterance—each token being thus associated with a distinct intension—circumstance-of-evaluation relativists preserve a unique intension for all the tokens by placing circumstances of evaluations under the influence of a certain ‘point of view’. The main difference between the two approaches (...) is that only the former can operate locally. It is shown that, for this reason, circumstance-of-evaluation relativism makes erroneous semantic predictions about (relative) gradable adjectives. (shrink)